Piracy Landscape Study:

Analysis of Existing and Emerging Research Relevant to Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Enforcement of Commercial-Scale Piracy

Prepared for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

Solicitation Number: 1333BJ19Q00142004

Brett Danaher Michael D. Smith Rahul Telang Chapman University Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University

This Version: March 20, 2020

Table of Contents

Executive Summary ...................................................................................................................... 3

1. The Piracy Ecosystem........................................................................................................... 4

1.1 Piracy of Physical Goods ................................................................................................ 6

1.1.1 Manufacturing......................................................................................................... 7

1.1.2 Discovery ................................................................................................................ 7

1.1.3 Distribution ............................................................................................................. 8

1.1.4 Communication, Payment Processing and Fulfillment......................................... 11

1.2 Piracy of Digital Goods ................................................................................................ 11

1.2.1 Sources.................................................................................................................. 12

1.2.2 Distribution ........................................................................................................... 14

1.2.3 Economic and Social Incentives ........................................................................... 16

2. The Scope and Magnitude of Economic Harm from Piracy ........................................... 18

2.1 Methodologies of Academic Studies on Piracy and Sales ............................................ 19

2.2 Estimated Effects of Piracy on Legal Consumption ..................................................... 22

2.3 Indirect Impacts of Piracy ............................................................................................. 29

2.4 Summary ....................................................................................................................... 32

3. The Effectiveness of Anti-Piracy Strategies ..................................................................... 33

3.1 Increasing the Availability and Appeal of Legal Content ............................................ 33

3.1.1 Increased Availability ........................................................................................... 34

3.1.2 Increased Appeal................................................................................................... 35

3.2 Making Illegal Content Less Attractive........................................................................ 37

3.2.1 Demand Side Interventions ................................................................................... 38

3.2.2 Supply Side Interventions ..................................................................................... 39

3.3 Summary ....................................................................................................................... 42

4. Open Questions for Future Research................................................................................ 43

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The objective of this paper is to produce a “comprehensive landscape study of existing and emerging research relevant to intellectual property rights enforcement in the area of commercial-scale piracy.”

This report addresses that goal in three main sections. First, we produce an overview of the actors involved in the generation and distribution of pirated content, how these actors are organized, and their financial motivations. Second, we review the peer-reviewed academic literature analyzing the harm caused by digital piracy, both to revenue in legal channels and to creative output in the entertainment sector. Finally, we review the peer-reviewed academic literature analyzing the effectiveness of both industry- and government-initiated anti-piracy efforts.

Our analysis of the academic literature on the impact of piracy shows that 29 out of 33 peer-reviewed papers find that piracy results in significant harm to legal sales. The 29 papers finding evidence of harm from piracy span markets for music, television, books, and films, and have considered physical CDs, DVDs, and Blu-Ray Discs sales; legal digital downloads, paid video streaming services; and the theatrical box office. There is also an emerging academic literature that these reduced financial incentives lead to a reduction in investment and overall creative output.

Our analysis of the academic literature on anti-piracy strategies shows that firms can reduce piracy by making legal content more available and more appealing. Strategies such as making legal content available on convenient digital channels or reducing the release windows between different releases of the same product are both effective at changing consumption of pirated content. However, none of these strategies have been shown to reduce piracy by more than 25 percent. Thus, there is a limit to firms’ ability to combat piracy by making legal channels more appealing.

Because of the limited effect of legal content on pirate consumption, there have been a variety of efforts initiated by firms and governments to make pirated content less appealing. The peer-reviewed academic literature shows that these efforts can be effective at reversing the harm from piracy. Specifically, a variety of “demand-side” anti-piracy efforts have been effective at reducing piracy and increasing legal consumption. These efforts target individuals demanding pirate content, either through legal actions against such individuals or notice sending programs informing individuals that they have been observed consuming pirated content, and may face legal action. However, there is also evidence that the popularity of demand-side anti-piracy efforts have declined in recent years, possibly due to their high cost, legal overhead, and PR risks.

As the popularity of demand-side anti-piracy efforts have declined, there has been an increase in the use of anti-piracy policies focused on limiting the supply of pirated content. The academic literature shows that these efforts can be effective at reducing pirate consumption. For example, ISP-level site blocking, which is gaining popularity worldwide, can reduce piracy and increase legal sales, but only when a sufficiently large number of sites are blocked simultaneously. Likewise, removing pirate links from online sources and reducing the prominence of pirated links in search results can reduce pirate consumption and increase legal consumption.

1. The Piracy Ecosystem

Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution grants Congress the power “to promote the

progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited time to authors and inventors the

exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” The ability to protect intellectual

property rights in this way has always been a central tool for providing artists and rightsholders

with the necessary economic incentives to invest in creating content, but it is particularly important

today. Because digitized works like films, books, music, television shows, and software can be

reproduced and distributed at near zero cost, economic theory predicts that in the absence of

copyright protection markets for selling such goods would be fiercely competitive—with prices

dropping toward zero. This, in turn would leave little room for creators to recover the fixed costs

associated with creating the original piece of work.

Given that creators invest substantial resources, in terms of time, money, talent, energy, and risk,

to create products,1 if rightsholders have limited opportunities to recover their initial investment,

they will in turn have limited incentives to create future products. These reduced creative

incentives could cause significant problems for creators, and for the broader society that benefits

from their talents. Given the association between copyright protection and artists’ incentives to

create, it is vitally important to understand the impact of piracy on economic markets, and the steps

policymakers, rightsholders, Internet intermediaries, and other stakeholders can take to ensure the

efficient functioning of markets for creative content.2

Our goal in this report is to present a holistic view of the piracy landscape. We define piracy as the

consumption of unlicensed consumption of copyrighted products, as distinct from counterfeiting,

which is the consumption of unlicensed trademarked products.

In this section, our analysis of the pirate landscape starts with the origination of pirate leaks and

the manufacturing of pirated physical goods; a discussion of piracy distribution mechanisms

including their supporting intermediaries, such as payment processors, online marketplaces, web

1 For example, music labels may invest millions of dollars to “break” a new artist, Hollywood films regularly have production budgets of several hundred million dollars, and authors can spend years working on a single book.2 In this report we define piracy as the unauthorized reproduction or use of another’s copyright.

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hosting services, and social networks; and a discussion of how actors in the ecosystem are

organized and their financial and social incentives for participating in piracy. We discuss the

academic literature regarding the impact of piracy on legal sales and creative incentives and the

impact of anti-piracy efforts in sections 2 and 3.

Before discussing the current state of piracy, it is important to note that piracy is not new. In the

nineteenth century, piracy of European books was widespread in the United States, given the

relatively weak protection U.S. copyright law provided to foreign authors (Balazs 2011). However,

the relatively high cost to duplicate and distribute printed books limited the scope and impact of

piracy in the nineteenth century. That changed in the late twentieth century as new technologies

reduced the costs associated with reproducing copyrighted content. For example, the introduction

of cassette tapes and photocopying machines enabled the unauthorized copying of audio files and

books in the 1960s and 1970s. Similarly, consumer adoption of Betamax and VHS recorder

systems in the 1970s and 1980s allowed home users to make copies of films distributed on VHS

and Betamax tapes and to record television and movie content from television broadcasts.

However, there is some evidence that when copying was limited to physical media in this manner,

its effects on copyright owners and markets for creative works was muted (see, for example,

Liebowitz 1985a, Liebowitz 1985b, Biasi and Moser 2018).

The digitization of media content and the widespread availability of the Internet in the late 1990s

radically changed the ease, quality, and scope of piracy. The introduction of MP3 encoding

technology for music reduced the size of song files dramatically and facilitated the introduction of

technologies that enabled widespread filesharing of music on the Internet. This culminated in the

introduction and popularity of Napster and other file sharing sites starting in 1999. In 2003, the

development of the BitTorrent filesharing protocol extended the digital piracy distribution

ecosystem by enabling the piracy of larger files, including movies and television shows.

Because Internet-based piracy of digital goods is unrestrained by physical media or distance, it is

significantly more widespread than physical piracy and significantly more difficult to combat. As

a result, theory suggests that Internet piracy could be vastly more disruptive to legal markets for

creative works than prior forms of physical piracy. For this reason, we will discuss the piracy

ecosystem for physical products and digital products separately in this section, and in the

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remaining sections we will focus our discussion on the academic literature pertaining to digital

piracy.

1.1 Piracy of Physical Goods

Our review of the physical and digital piracy ecosystems starts with a high-level discussion of the

scale of piracy in the marketplace, the potential economic harm from piracy, and the ecosystem

supporting the production, distribution, and discovery of pirated products. We define physical

goods as copyrighted products that are distributed in a physical medium (e.g., pirated CDs, DVDs,

and Blu-ray discs).

Based on various government and industry studies, the scale of physical piracy is extensive. The

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD 2019) examined the rise in sale

of pirated copyrighted goods and counterfeit trademarked goods. They found that “in 2016,

international trade in counterfeit and pirated products amounted to as much as USD 509 billion.”

This number made up 3.3 percent of world trade and represented a substantial increase from a prior

study that found counterfeit and pirated products represented only 2.5 percent of world trade in

2013.

Similarly, the Government Accountability Office (GAO 2018) conducted a study of shipments

entering the U.S. of both copyrighted and trademarked goods. The GAO study used “undercover

purchases” of consumer goods offered by third-party sellers on “popular consumer websites” and

found that 43 percent (20 of 47) of the products they purchased were pirated or counterfeit. For

entertainment products, the likelihood of finding pirated physical products may be lower than for

counterfeit goods, but it is still substantial. A recent study by the Recording Industry Association

of American found that, among a sample of popular and “evergreen” records, 16 percent (13 of

79) of the titles purchased on eBay and 11 percent (9 of 80) of the titles purchased on Amazon

were pirated (RIAA 2019).

Given the likelihood of finding pirated physical products in online markets, it’s not surprising that

many consumers have purchased pirated or counterfeit physical products online. A 2019 study by

the Better Business Bureau (BBB 2019b) found that 25 percent of American consumers have

purchased a pirated or counterfeit product online, and a 2018 study by Incopro (Incopro 2018),

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found nearly identical results in the UK, with 25 percent of UK consumers reporting that they had

purchased pirated or counterfeit products in 2017.

The supply chain of physical pirated goods is similar in many ways to the supply chain of

legitimate physical goods. The supply chain contains manufacturers and distributors, and involves

intermediaries facilitating product discovery and payment processing. There is one important

difference however: unlike the supply chain for legitimate products, payments in the piracy

ecosystem don’t make their way back to the intellectual property owner.

Below we discuss the manufacturing, discovery, distribution, payment processing, and fulfillment

functions for physical pirated goods.

1.1.1 Manufacturing

The vast majority of manufacturing operations for pirated physical products are located

internationally, particularly in Pacific Rim countries. For example, the Government Accounting

Office found that in 2016, 88 percent of all intellectual property rights seizures came from China

or Hong Kong (GAO 2018, Figure 2, page 13).

With respect to book piracy, the Authors Guild notes that the advent of print-on-demand

technologies has dramatically lowered the cost of book printing, allowing pirates to flood the

market with cheaper print-on-demand copies of books.3 The lack of vetting mechanisms by print-

on-demand service providers makes it very convenient for pirates to upload digital files of

infringing copies and use the file to print and sell pirate copies directly to customers through third-

party seller accounts, frequently located in the United States.

1.1.2 Discovery

The Better Business Bureau states that “most people find fake products from internet searches,”

and it is common for pirates and counterfeiters to use standard Search Engine Optimization

strategies to ensure that their products are listed toward the top of search results (BBB 2019a). The

sale of pirated content in online channels may be particularly problematic for consumers given the

difficulty in distinguishing pirated products from legitimate ones. If you buy a CD or a DVD from

3 Authors Guild Comments to the Department of Commerce, p. 4, https://www.authorsguild.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Authors-Guild-Comments.DOC-Counterfeiting-1.pdf

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a physical marketplace, there are ample physical clues one can use to determine whether it is a

fake, but there are far fewer clues online. Once arriving at an online site, pirated products are

difficult to identify—even for the rightsholders themselves—without actually purchasing and

receiving the product (BBB 2019a, p. 6).

1.1.3 Distribution

Traditional online marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay, are responsible for a significant

proportion of piracy in physical goods. According to the Seal Network, 70 percent of the pirated

and counterfeit goods sold each year are sold through online marketplaces.4 The role online

marketplaces play in piracy is not surprising given their prominence in all forms of commerce, but

it is exacerbated by the relative anonymity of sellers in Amazon and eBay’s online marketplaces.

Sites like Amazon and eBay have strong business reasons for wanting to create online

marketplaces that allow buyers and sellers to transact. Two-sided markets, such as those present

in eBay’s auction marketplace and Amazon’s retail marketplace, have strong network effects,

creating near “winner-take-all” outcomes for market leaders (Eisenmann et al. 2006; Van Alstyne

et al. 2016). Amazon and eBay also benefit significantly from the scale present in their online

marketplaces. While eBay has always relied on its role as a marketplace between independent

sellers and buyers, Amazon’s marketplace business has grown significantly since its founding. Jeff

Bezos announced that marketplace sales made up 58 percent of Amazon’s total merchandise

revenue in 2018 versus just 3 percent in 1999.5 Most of the transactions on Amazon and eBay

occur directly between the buyer and the seller without requiring the platform to take possession

of the product itself. Given their size and market power, eBay and Amazon are able to charge

sellers a substantial share of the purchase price (around 5-9 percent in the case of eBay and 15

percent in the case of Amazon) simply for facilitating the transaction (although sellers have the

4 See https://medium.com/sealnetwork/70-of-counterfeit-products-are-sold-online-c6eafe07083 5 https://www.statista.com/chart/18751/physical-gross-merchandise-sales-on-amazon-by-type-of-seller/. See also https://www.statista.com/statistics/259782/third-party-seller-share-of-amazon-platform/ which finds that Amazon’s marketplace made up 54 percent of unit sales in the second quarter of 2019.

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option to pay Amazon to facilitate product fulfillment, and eBay has announced a similar

fulfillment service will launch in 2020).6

However, while there are many legitimate benefits to platforms giving access to third-party sellers,

the anonymity offered by online marketplaces means that third-party sellers are significant sources

for counterfeit and pirated physical products. In the context of trademarked goods, counterfeit

copies of a variety of products including Elevation Lab headphone mounts,7 Forearm Forklift

moving straps,8 Nite Ize car mounts, Otterbox electronics cases, and Vera Bradley bags have been

reported to be available from Amazon Marketplace sellers.9 Some brands have responded to the

threat posed by these goods by removing all their products from eBay or Amazon’s online

marketplace. For example, in 2017, Birkenstock removed their products entirely from Amazon’s

platform after discovering multiple counterfeit products available from Amazon marketplace

sellers.10

Both eBay and Amazon have responded to rightsholder concerns by taking steps against pirated

and counterfeit products on their site. eBay has a detailed policy prohibiting the sale of “replicas,

counterfeits, or unauthorized copies,”11 a money-back guarantee program that covers items that

“don’t match the listing” on eBay,12 and procedures for buyers and rightsholders to report eBay

listings that potentially infringe copyright.13 Similarly, in February 2019 Amazon announced

“Project Zero,” a program designed to empower rightsholders to “drive counterfeits to zero.”14

The program aims to use Machine Learning methods based on brand images and logos to

proactively identify counterfeit products among the 5 billion product listings Amazon receives per

day,15 enhanced “self-service” tools to allow copyright owners and trademark owners to identify

6 https://venturebeat.com/2019/07/24/ebay-takes-on-amazon-with-managed-delivery-a-fulfillment-service-for-u-s-sellers/7 https://fortune.com/2018/03/03/amazon-complicit-selling-counterfeit-products/8 https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2017/09/27/amazon-com-the-place-where-american-dreams-are-stolen-by-chinese-counterfeiters/#e94739c4c72e9 https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/27/amazon-files-suit-against-more-counterfeiters/ 10 https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/04/amazon-may-have-a-counterfeit-problem/558482 11 https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/prohibited-restricted-items/fake-items-policy?id=4276 12 https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/ebay-money-back-guarantee-policy/ebay-money-back-guarantee-policy?id=421013 https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/listing-policies/selling-policies/intellectual-property-vero-program?id=4349 14 https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/amazon-project-zero 15 https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/27/amazon-files-suit-against-more-counterfeiters/

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and remove their products from Amazon’s marketplace, and procedures to help buyers

differentiate between legitimate and counterfeit goods through serial numbers assigned by the

trademark owner.

Nonetheless, many copyright owners argue that Amazon’s efforts have been ineffective at

reducing overall copyright violations on the site. In a June 2019 story in the New York Times, Mary

Rasenberger, executive director of the Authors Guild, observed that “counterfeiting of books on

Amazon has surged” in recent years. Likewise, an August 2019 investigation by the Wall Street

Journal found 4,152 items for sale on Amazon’s marketplace that “have been declared unsafe by

federal agencies, are deceptively labeled or are banned by federal regulators,” and that 46 percent

of these products were fulfilled by Amazon as opposed to being shipped from the marketplace

seller.

In spite of the fact that many pirated and counterfeit products remain on these platforms, the

increased enforcement at Amazon and eBay has caused many pirates to move their operations to

social media platforms. According to a study in the UK, social media sites like Facebook and

Instagram have overtaken online auction sites like eBay as the source of counterfeit products, due

in large degree to eBay’s aggressive stance against counterfeiting (Forster 2015). For trademarked

goods, Stroppa and Specchiarello (2014) found that 24 percent of all Facebook advertisements for

fashion and luxury products link to sites trafficking in counterfeit products.

In some cases, the ability to sell pirated goods on social media sites is directly facilitated by the

site’s privacy protection features. For example, Instagram allows users to post “Instagram Stories,”

short video clips that “disappear” after 24-hours. While this feature has legitimate purposes for

Instagram’s users, an article in Business Insider argues that it has made it easier for pirates and

counterfeiters to advertise products without leaving a permanent record of the advertisement.16

Consistent with this view, a study by Ghost Data identified over 55,000 accounts on Instagram

that create an average 1.6 million Instagram stories per month advertising pirate and counterfeit

products (Stroppa et al. 2019).

16 https://www.businessinsider.com/instagram-riddled-with-people-selling-fake-fashion-goods-2019-5

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1.1.4 Communication, Payment Processing and Fulfillment

Social media sites are also increasingly popular for sellers of pirated physical products because of

their flexible payment systems. On platforms like Amazon and eBay, communication and payment

occur through the platform. This allows the platform to maintain ownership over the transaction

and the customer, but it also increases the risk for sellers of counterfeit goods: if a seller’s account

is shut down by the platform, the seller will no longer be able to communicate with their buyers.

In contrast, pirates and counterfeiters on social media channels are able to use third-party tools to

communicate directly with customers and process payments. According to Ghost Data (Stroppa et

al. 2019), the most popular communication tools for Instagram pirates and counterfeiters in 2019

were WhatsApp (used by 57 percent of all the pirates and counterfeiters in the Ghost Data sample),

WeChat (15 percent) Line (13 percent) and Viber (5 percent);17 and the most popular payment

processors accepted by Instagram pirates and counterfeiters were WeChat Pay (40 percent), PayPal

(36 percent), Venmo (7 percent), and CashApp (6 percent). Within the same sample, most

fulfillment of pirated and counterfeit goods was handled by EMS (54 percent), DHL (33 percent),

and UPS (10 percent). Pirate sellers even exploit the characteristics of payment systems to protect

their sales. A Business Insider story found that many sellers request payment through PayPal’s

Friends and Family feature, which does not protect buyers against pirated and counterfeit goods.18

1.2 Piracy of Digital Goods

As with physical piracy, government and industry studies suggest that there is substantial

economic harm from digital piracy. For example, Blackburn et al. (2019) find that, worldwide,

there are approximately 26.6 billion illegal pirated viewings of U.S. produced films each year as

well as 126.7 billion pirated viewings of U.S. produced television shows. The authors estimate that

this causes a loss to domestic revenues of $29.2 billion to $71 billion per year, which implies losses

between 11 percent and 25 percent of industry revenue. The authors also find that this leads to

between 230,000 and 560,000 lost jobs in the U.S. each year. Similarly, according to a 2017

17 The advantage of using these external communication applications is that if Instagram shuts down the counterfeiter’s Instagram account, the counterfeiter maintains their ability to communicate with their customers. 18 https://www.businessinsider.com/instagram-riddled-with-people-selling-fake-fashion-goods-2019-5

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Digimarc/Nielsen survey, U.S. publishers lost approximately $315 million in sales because of

digital piracy.19

While industry studies such as these provide high-level estimates of the total impact of digital

piracy across a variety of sectors, a growing academic literature extends these industry studies by

providing detailed causal analysis, and peer-review quality validation. We review these academic

studies in detail in section 2 below.

The supply chain for digital pirated goods mirrors the supply chain for physical pirated goods in

that intermediaries facilitate discovery of pirated content by consumers, the distribution of content

from providers to consumers, and the flow of payments from consumers to both platforms and

providers. The major difference between the supply chains for physical and digital piracy is that,

while physical piracy must be manufactured and delivered in a physical format, digital piracy

requires no manufacturing step and is distributed virtually, thereby reducing the cost and

increasing the scope and scale of digital piracy operations.

1.2.1 Sources

According to a report by the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT 2017), “most [digital]

pirated content starts with so-called release groups.” Release groups are loosely organized groups

of individuals, frequently located in different countries. Release groups list the group’s name in

content they post online and compete with other groups to “build their brand and develop a

reputation for reliable and high-quality content” (FACT 2017).

Content provided by release groups can come from almost any stage in the production and

distribution of entertainment goods, including prior to their official release. For example, in 2009,

the movie “X-Men Wolverine” was released onto pirate networks more than a month before its

official theatrical release date when a workprint copy of the movie was leaked during the post-

production process.20 Similarly, in February 2017 several shows were leaked from the post-

19 Digimarc Corporation Press release, https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/e-book-piracy-costspublishers-315-million-in-lost-sales-300423534.html 20 https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/business/media/02film.html

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production company Larson Studios, including season five episodes of the Netflix Original series

“Orange is the New Black.”21

However, it is relatively rare for content to leak prior to their official release because firms are able

to use both technical and procedural practices to limit the number of people who have access to

their content prior to its release.22 Once content is released onto legal distribution channels, that

control goes away. In the case of movies, piracy occurs almost immediately after a movie’s initial

theatrical release with so-called “Cam” rips of movies. Cam copies of movies are made by pirates

who use video cameras to record movies in the theater, sometimes with ambient audio from the

theater and sometimes with audio from a higher quality audio source synced to the source video.

Because Cam rips are obtained from an analog source, they usually have relatively low quality,

which some research suggests reduces their harm relative to higher quality digital rips (see, for

example, Burtch et al. 2019). Trade organizations, such as the Motion Picture Association, also go

to great lengths to make it difficult for individuals to record video in theaters and conduct

enforcement against individuals caught recording content in theaters.23

Digital releases present a much more significant challenge for content owners. Once content is

released in a digital format, it becomes much easier for release groups to obtain and distribute. For

example, anyone in the manufacturing or distribution supply chain for CDs and DVD/Blu-Ray

discs is a potential source of pirate content. This is why high-quality digital rips of most movies

are available 1-2 weeks before the official DVD or Blu-ray release date, and almost immediately

after release on digital platforms such as iTunes and Google Play.

Similarly, in the music industry it has long been the case that consumers could copy songs from

CDs which lack Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection. But as the industry has shifted

away from physical sales and toward digital subscription services, it has seen a significant rise in

stream-ripping — copying music files from the digital content provided by legal streaming

21 https://www.wired.com/2017/05/orange-is-the-new-black-leak/22 See, for example, the Motion Picture Association of America’s Content Security Guidelines at https://www.mpaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/MPAA-Best-Practices-Common-Guidelines-V4.05-Final.pdf23 See, for example, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/10/mpaa-movie-theaters-announce-zero-tolerance-policy-against-wearables/

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services. A 2017 survey conducted by the International Federation of Phonographic Industries

(IFPI) found that 35 percent of Internet users across 13 countries surveyed obtain music through

stream ripping, versus only 30 percent the prior year (IFPI 2017). Similarly, a 2019 survey by

MusicWatch “estimated that there are 17 million stream-rippers in the US during 2018, up from

15 million in 2017.”24

The same goes for publishing: as the demand for ebooks increases, especially in genres like

romance, which has almost entirely migrated to digital distribution, pirates have more

opportunities to disrupt legitimate distribution channels. So far, the publishing industry has not

been able to develop protective technologies against mass copyright infringement. The industry

standard DRM protection is very easy to circumvent. As with other digital content, pirated ebooks

are typically sourced from files where DRM protection has been stripped.

Video games and other entertainment software can include more flexible digital rights

management systems than what is available within the ebook, DVD and Blu-ray standards.

Nonetheless, gaming release groups compete with each other to see who can be the first to break

the copy protection and release the game onto pirate networks. Chandra (2016) describes the

structure of gaming release groups as “following a strict division of labor” across suppliers,

crackers, testers, and packers. Suppliers frequently have strong connections within the gaming

supply chain, which gives them the ability to obtain copies of games either prior to their release or

immediately after release. Crackers then take the game and determine how to remove or disable

any digital rights management software. Testers ensure that the cracked game works according to

its design (thus maintaining the reputation of the release group), and packers remove any

unnecessary code to reduce the size of the released content.

1.2.2 Distribution

Once a pirate source is available, release groups race to be the first to post it to online websites

and networks. These networks can take a variety of forms. Early piracy networks such as Napster

and Grokster were based on peer-to-peer networks with a centralized structure. While a centralized

peer-to-peer structure simplifies the operation of the network, centralization comes with a

24 https://www.musicwatchinc.com/blog/thanks-to-stream-ripping-music-piracy-still-a-scourge/

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significant vulnerability: A central point of operation that can be targeted and shut down through

technical and legal means. For example, both the Napster and Grokster networks were shut down

through court orders in the U.S.

Decentralized peer-to-peer networks such as BitTorrent gained popularity following the shutdown

of Napster and Grokster. BitTorrent piracy operates with “swarms” of users who provide and

download segments of an individual digital file. BitTorrent tracker sites such as The Pirate Bay

and Torrentz2 provide users with links to tracker files that maintain a record of the file segments

of the content and which participants in the swarm are sharing each segment of the file. One

weakness of BitTorrent networks, however, is that to participate users have to make their IP

address available to the network, which can expose the user’s identity to rightsholders and other

enforcement agencies (although many BitTorrent users mask their true IP address using the

services of various Virtual Private Networks).

The weaknesses of the BitTorrent network gave rise to downloading from cyberlocker sites like

Rapidgator, M247, and uploaded.net; and to streaming sites like 123movies.com, Kinogo.cc, and

movies.nl. Cyberlocker sites directly host content uploaded by users and make this content

available to downloaders. Streaming piracy sites host content and deliver this content to users

through video streaming.

The popularity of these sites has increased relative to BitTorrent in recent years. Sandvine

estimates that BitTorrent traffic declined from 23 percent of all North American Internet traffic in

2011 to just 5 percent in 2016.25 Similarly, the office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR

2018) estimates that pirate streaming sites have “[overtaken] pirate torrent and direct download

sites for distribution of pirated content.” One reason for their popularity is that it is difficult for

rightsholders to identify the individual users downloading content from these sites because of the

direct connection between the user and the site, and it is difficult to target the sites themselves

because they are generally located in countries with lax copyright enforcement (USTR 2018).

While pirate content sourced from cyberlockers and streaming sites can be downloaded and viewed

directly on a user’s computer, Kodi software and hardware makes it easy for individuals to watch

25 https://www.wired.com/2017/05/orange-is-the-new-black-leak/

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pirated content on home theater systems by providing a piracy platform and user experience that

mimics the experience through standard cable boxes. Kodi, which was initially called the Xbox

Media Center (or XBMC), was designed as an open source application to allow consumers to play

video content stored on their local devices and to stream content from remote sources. While Kodi

itself is an open source software application, maintained by the XMBC Foundation (Sandvine

2017), many individuals have developed “add-ons” that allow users to extend the capability of the

baseline Kodi software to access and stream content from sources online. Some of these add-ons

allow users to stream from licensed sources, including YouTube and the BBC iPlayers. However,

many Kodi add-ons exist primarily to provide users with a way to consume unlicensed copyrighted

content, much of which are sourced from pirate cyberlocker and streaming sites.

As Kodi grew in popularity, a cottage industry developed of individuals selling “fully loaded”

Kodi boxes—small computers pre-loaded with the Kodi software and add-ons necessary to obtain

a wide variety of unlicensed content through online sources. Fully loaded Kodi boxes became

available from a variety of sources including eBay, for prices in the range of $50 to $200. As of

2017, Sandvine estimated that 8.8 percent of North American households had Kodi boxes and

roughly 68 percent of these boxes were configured with add-ons designed to access unlicensed

content (Sandvine 2017). Alongside Kodi, similar piracy ecosystems have developed around the

Plex media player.26

1.2.3 Economic and Social Incentives

Participants in the digital piracy supply chain are motivated by a powerful combination of

economic and social incentives. On the economic side, piracy can be a profitable endeavor for

leakers, sites, and individuals. While many leakers primarily seek social incentives, as we describe

below, some are well paid for their ability to obtain leaked content early in a product’s release. For

example, a 2015 article on the TorrentFreak blog discussed the experiences of a pirate going by

the name of SaInT from the release group MaTinE who claimed that “he was offered $3,000 each

[to supply] movies on the day of their release.”27

26 See, for example, https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/23/20697751/piracy-plex-netflix-hulu-streaming-wars 27 https://torrentfreak.com/movie-piracy-veteran-recalls-20-years-in-the-scene-151011/

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After content has been leaked, sites who host the content can profit in a variety of ways, starting

with advertising. Incopro (2015) found that advertising is the primary source of revenue for the

top 250 piracy sites it surveyed, and it identified DirectREV, PropellerAds/OneClickAds, and

AdCash as the top intermediaries serving advertisements to piracy link sites and public P2P portals.

Similarly, a study commissioned by the Digital Citizens Alliance (2014) estimated that the top 600

piracy websites online earned a combined $227 million in advertising revenue annually, and that

the top 30 sites earned, on average, $4.4 million annually. Overall, the study estimated that piracy

sites enjoy profit margins ranging from 80-94 percent. A RAND study found that the profit margins

for pirated goods are “much higher than those for drugs” and quoted a pirate suspect as telling the

Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department that piracy is “better than the dope business, and no one’s going

to prison for [selling pirated] DVDs” (Treverton, et al. 2009). Advertising is sufficiently profitable

that some pirate sites have created affiliate programs that allow users who post sufficiently popular

content to share in the advertising revenue generated by their posts.

Subscription fees are another way that pirate sites can generate revenue. For example, before it

was shutdown, the cyberlocker Megaupload received more than $110 million through PayPal for

user subscriptions to its premium accounts.28 Ironically, Kodi boxes, have weakened the business

model of some sites by allowing Kodi users to avoid on-site advertising. In April 2019,

TorrentFreak reported that RapidVideo was changing its business model from advertising to

subscription because “freeloading” Kodi users were capturing “half of the site’s bandwidth without

generating any revenue.”29 Two weeks later the same blog reported that Openload, another major

file hosting site, was discontinuing its advertising affiliate program due to “ongoing weakness in

generating revenue from advertising.”30

In addition to advertising and subscription revenue, malware is a significant source of revenue for

pirate sites. The Incopro study cited above found that one-third of advertisements on pirate sites

were “trick button/malware” advertisements—advertisements that expose users to malware and

28 https://www.wired.com/2012/01/megaupload-indicted-shuttered/ 29 https://torrentfreak.com/freeloading-kodi-add-on-users-are-undermining-rapidvideo-190405/ 30 https://torrentfreak.com/huge-video-hoster-openload-stops-paying-uploaders-190419/

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other security risks. A 2017 study by the Digital Citizens Alliance (2017) estimated that pirate

websites make $70 million annually from exposing their users to malware.

Direct extortion is also an economic option being explored by some pirates. After the leak of the

fifth season of “Orange is the New Black” in February 2017, a hacker going by the name “The

Dark Overlord” demanded a “modest” ransom from Netflix not to release the leaked episodes. The

Walt Disney Company also received a ransom demand from a pirate claiming (falsely) to possess

a leaked copy of Pirates of the Caribbean 5.31

While there are clear economic incentives to participate in piracy, social and reputational

incentives are also important motivators for individuals involved in the generation and distribution

of digital piracy. For example, a 2002 article in The New York Times, compares participation in

piracy to the “technological equivalent of joy riding—a form of bravado” used to secure

“acceptance in a hierarchical social sphere.” The article quotes David Grime, a former member of

the release group “DrinkOrDie,” as saying that participation in pirate release groups is “all about

stature…they are just trying to make a name for themselves for no reason other than self-

gratification.”32 In 2010, Wesley Hsu, an assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted some of the

individuals responsible for releasing “X-Men Wolverine” on the Internet observed that many

leakers were driven by “some sort of Internet prestige thing” and saying “that’s sort of how the

culture works.” Similarly, Basamanowicz and Bouchard (2011) summarize the motivation for

many release group participants as “seeking thrill from law enforcement,” being ideologically

against copyright protection, or being attracted by the personal challenge and reputation of being

the first to “crack” the protection on a piece of software.

2. The Scope and Magnitude of Economic Harm from Piracy

The purpose of this section is to evaluate the academic literature on the effect that Internet piracy

has had on sales of copyrighted works. Below, we start by analyzing the statistical difficulties in

understanding the relationship between piracy and legitimate sales, and the various methodological

31 https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/disney-chief-bob-iger-says-hackers-claim-have-stolen-a-disney-movie-1003949 32 https://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/11/technology/pirates-on-the-web-spoils-on-the-street.html

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approaches that papers in the academic literature have used to overcome these statistical

difficulties.

2.1 Methodologies of Academic Studies on Piracy and Sales

The adage that “correlation does not establish causation” is critically important when analyzing

whether piracy harms legal sales because it is common to hear simple comparisons of sales across

time, across products, or across customers provided as evidence for the harm or benefit of piracy.

A quick glance at industry sales figures after the introduction of file sharing technologies in the

late 1990s and early 2000s might suggest that digital piracy was devastating to sales in legitimate

markets. For example, in the 10 years after Napster made music piracy popular, worldwide

recorded music sales shrunk by over 50 percent (Liebowitz 2014). Similarly, in the four years

following the introduction of the BitTorrent protocol in 2003, home video sales decreased by 27

percent (Zentner 2010). On the other hand, looking at piracy levels across products or across

consumers would suggest that piracy has been massively beneficial to legal sales. It is well

documented that movies which are pirated more also tend to sell more, and that consumers who

pirate content are more likely to purchase content than other customers.

However, none of the above comparisons establish a causal link between piracy and sales. The

mere fact that legal music sales dropped after the introduction of Napster, and that legal motion

picture sales dropped after the introduction of BitTorrent, does not establish that piracy caused this

decline in sales. It is entirely possible that the observed drop in legal sales was caused by other

unrelated events—changes in consumer tastes, changes in consumption patterns, a recession

economy, competition from other entertainment sources—that happened to coincide with the

introduction of these piracy-enabling technologies.

Similarly, the mere fact that movies that have higher levels of piracy also tend to have higher levels

of sales, or that consumers who are likely to pirate entertainment are also likely to purchase

entertainment, does not establish that piracy causes an increase in sales. Some movies are just more

popular than others, and this increased popularity at the product-level causes both increased sales

and increased piracy for that product. Likewise, consumers with greater interest in entertainment

products are likely to both purchase more products and pirate more products than other consumers.

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What we really want to know is how many more products might have sold, and how many more

consumers might have purchased, if piracy had not been an option. Fortunately, there are several

empirical methods that have been used in the academic literature to reliably analyze causation

between piracy and sales.

The first method involves the use of individual data—whether from surveys or from Internet panel

tracking companies—on piracy rates and legal consumption rates. In studies using individual

survey data, authors typically try to find some source of variation in piracy rates across consumers

(or within consumers but over time) that is not itself correlated with variation in legal purchases.

For example, in an early version of this method, Rob and Waldfogel (2006) use the fact that some

students in their survey attended a university that provided broadband Internet access, while others

chose a university that provided only slower dial-up connections. Based on the assumption that

students did not choose their university based on their interest in entertainment, Rob and Waldfogel

asked how the increased ease of consuming piracy via high-speed connections on some campuses

influenced music CD purchases by students residing at those campuses. Similarly, under the

assumption that the decision to adopt the Internet prior to Napster was unrelated to the desire to

consume entertainment, Hong (2013) uses data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey to ask how

individuals who identified as Internet users changed their music purchasing behavior after the

introduction of Napster relative to the individuals who did not identify as Internet users (and thus

were unaffected by Napster).

More recently, researchers have relied on individual data from Internet panel tracking companies

who monitor a random sample of Internet users and track their daily Internet activity. These studies

also attempt to isolate differences in pirated consumption that are unrelated to the propensity to

consume legally. For example, Aguiar and Martens (2016) use Internet panel data from Nielsen

and ask whether individuals who increase their visits to music piracy sites (from period to period)

increase or decrease their visits to legal music purchasing sites, relative to individuals who do not

change their visits to piracy sites. They also partly control for changing preferences for music

(within individuals) with measures of the number of music-related sites that individuals visit, such

as music blogs or concert listing sites. Danaher et al. (2020) study individuals in a UK Internet

panel before and after a number of video piracy websites were blocked in that country and ask

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whether more intense users of those sites increase their legal video consumption after the blocks

relative to lighter or non-users of the blocked sites.

The second method involves changes in piracy and sales across different media products, often

exploiting shocks that impact only some products or time-periods, and that directly influence either

piracy or sales but not both. In this vein, Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf (2007) obtain data on both

pirated downloads and legal CD purchases of various albums over time, and exploit German school

holidays (which they argue influence piracy availability on music filesharing networks but do not

directly affect U.S. CD purchases) as an instrument for piracy to determine whether illegal

downloads affect purchasing behavior. Danaher et al. (2010) study the removal of all NBC

television content from iTunes in 2007 and ask how piracy of that content changes relative to

piracy of television content from ABC, CBS, and Fox, all of which remained on iTunes during this

time.

A third and related method to understand the causal link between piracy and legal sales uses

geographic panel data, asking whether countries or regions that experience greater increases or

decreases in piracy also experience larger changes in legal consumption. Some of these studies

overcome the endogeneity problem (the fact that overall changes in media preference in a certain

geographical area will impact both piracy and legal purchases) by finding circumstances that

directly impact piracy in some geographic regions without being directly related to sales in those

same regions. For example, Zentner (2005) uses differential changes in broadband penetration

across countries to study the impact of piracy on sales. He does this under the assumption that

increased broadband penetration correlates with increased piracy without directly influencing

preferences for media sales. Other papers use country-specific shocks that affect piracy. For

example, Danaher et al. (2014) study the change in French digital music sales after the French

government passed a strict antipiracy law by comparing changes in French music sales after the

law’s passage to sales changes in other similar European countries who passed no such law.

Similarly, Adermon and Liang (2014) study the passage of an antipiracy law in Sweden and

compare changes in music sales to other similar countries without a legal shock.

Overall, while the units of observation differ across these three types of studies (individual

consumers versus products versus geographic areas), what these studies have in common is that

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they attempt to find some random shock that leads to variance in piracy levels but that is unrelated

to legal consumption. These approaches are often referred to as “natural experiments” or “quasi-

experiments,” and are well-established tools used by econometricians and statisticians to account

for the endogeneity between piracy and sales discussed earlier.

Given the presence of reliable methods for determining whether there is a causal link between

piracy and sales, the next question is what these methods tell us about how and whether piracy

influences sales. We address this question in the next section.

2.2 Estimated Effects of Piracy on Legal Consumption

From a purely theoretical standpoint piracy could either decrease, increase, or have no effect on

legal sales. Most obviously, if pirates are people who would have otherwise purchased the content

they are pirating, then the presence of piracy will displace legal sales, reducing revenues to

rightsholders. However, if pirates are individuals who would not have purchased the content they

are pirating in the first place, then piracy will have no effect on legal sales. It is even possible that

individuals who pirate content will tell their friends about the content, creating a promotional “buzz”

that could in turn increase legal consumption if the pirate’s friends choose to consume through

legal channels instead of illegitimate channels. Alternatively, some individuals may use piracy as

a sampling method to decide whether they like a product before buying it. In short, the impact of

piracy on sales is inherently an empirical question. In this section we study the empirical evidence

associated with piracy’s impact on sales for three categories of goods: music, motion picture

content, and books.

In reviewing this literature, three things are important to note:

First, the broad question of “does piracy harm sales?” is unlikely to have a simple “yes” or “no”

answer that applies to all products, channels, and contexts. The effect of piracy on legal sales may

differ depending on the time-period being studied, the type of content in question, or the sales

channels under analysis. A pirated MP3 may be a strong substitute for a legal iTunes download,

while a low-quality pirated movie may be a poor substitute for seeing a film in the theaters.

Likewise, the impact of piracy may vary over the lifecycle of a product. The availability of a

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pirated version immediately after a movie is first released in theaters might have a different impact

on sales than one that appears weeks after the movie’s initial release.

Second, there are no perfect empirical studies. All of the methodologies described above have

advantages and disadvantages, weaknesses and strengths.

Third, not all academic studies are created equal. The gold standard of quality in the academic

literature is publication in peer-reviewed journals.

Because of this, in our review of the literature below, instead of relying on a single study as the

source of “truth” on the impact of piracy on sales, (a) we analyze the results from a broad set of

studies that use different methods in different contexts over different time periods and (b) we focus

on articles that have been published in peer-reviewed academic journals.

With these points in mind, below we review the empirical evidence on how piracy impacts legal

consumption, starting with the music.

Music: Because widespread digital piracy affected the music industry before it affected books and

video, music piracy has been studied in the academic literature over a much longer timeframe

(roughly 1998-2012) than other categories of entertainment. While the broad timespan of study

has some advantages, it also creates three notable challenges when generalizing the results from

these studies to the current music market. First, piracy’s effect may have changed over time,

particularly as legal music streaming services have entered the market. Second, these studies focus

on different formats, such as CD sales vs. digital music downloads. Finally, these studies attempt

to measure piracy’s effect in different units. For example, some measure the displacement rate

(how many pirated downloads does it take to reduce legal purchases by one unit?) while others

measure the aggregate loss directly in sales units or revenue.

Nonetheless, a meta-review of all of the academic studies on music piracy can give a sense of both

the direction (positive or negative) and the general magnitude of the impact of digital piracy on

legal sales. The earliest study of music piracy in the peer-reviewed academic literature is Hui and

Png (2003). Their study used worldwide CD sales data collected from 1994-1998 to analyze the

impact of physical piracy on music sales. They found that physical piracy caused about a 6.6

percent drop in CD sales relative to what sales would have been in the absence of piracy.

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In the context of digital piracy, the results of early studies are mixed. Peitz and Waelbroeck (2004)

combined worldwide CD sales with survey data across countries on piracy behavior and found that

piracy may have led to a 20 percent decline in CD sales from 1998 to 2002, while Zentner (2005)

finds from 1997 to 2002 that countries with larger increases in broadband penetration experienced

steeper drops in music sales than those with smaller increases in broadband. Similarly, Rob and

Waldfogel (2006) use differing Internet speeds provided at different universities in 2003 to tease

out piracy’s effect on music sales. Their analysis of these data shows that one out of every five

illegal downloads led to a lost CD sale.

On the other hand, Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf (2007), in a highly cited study, used German

school holidays as an instrument for piracy availability in 2002 and found that piracy had no

statistically significant impact on album purchases. Similarly, Andersen and Frenz (2010) found

no association between pirated downloads and legal purchases in a 2006 survey of Canadian

consumers.

In spite of somewhat mixed results in early studies of music piracy, more recent studies have

converged on the finding that digital piracy significantly displaces legal music sales in almost all

contexts. For example, Liebowitz (2008) finds that music piracy was responsible for almost the

entire decline in record sales from 1998 to 2003; Bender and Wang (2009) find that for each one

percent increase in piracy, music sales decline by 0.6 percent; Waldfogel (2010) finds that each

additional pirated song reduces song purchases by 1/3 to 1/6; and Hong (2013) finds that

filesharing is likely to explain about 20 percent of the total decline in music sales following Napster.

Danaher et al. (2014) find that the passage of HADOPI, a major anti-filesharing law in France,

increased French digital music sales by 20-25 percent relative to a group of control countries.

Given that the law wasn’t 100-percent effective at eliminating piracy, the estimated 20-25 percent

increase in legal sales is a lower bound on the effect that piracy had on total digital music sales.

Similarly, Adermon and Liang (2014) found that the passage of a major antipiracy initiative in

Sweden increased music sales by 36 percent after it was implemented, again implying a lower

bound on the effect that piracy had on sales.33 Finally, Koh et al. (2019) find that piracy displaces

33 The above two studies are lower bounds because neither law completely eliminated piracy. If a law that partially reduces piracy increases music sales by x percent, then logically it follows that x percent is a lower bound on the total effect that all piracy has on music sales.

24

music sales using data from 1982 to 2012, but they suggest that its effect has been partly attenuated

by the introduction of digital downloads and the unbundling of the album (a factor we discuss in

more detail below).

Altogether, we found 20 peer-reviewed studies that address the question of what impact piracy has

on music sales. Seventeen of these studies find evidence that piracy significantly displaces legal

sales, while two studies find no evidence of any effect, and one suggests a small causal increase in

some countries and no effect in other countries. As we noted above, while scientific research may

produce differing results because causal inference is complicated and the settings under analysis

differ, our meta-review suggests that the vast majority of scientific work finds evidence that piracy

causes legal music sales to fall. Estimates of the magnitude of this effect vary, but nearly all of the

studies find effects that are not just statistically significant but also economically substantial.

However, even the most recent studies in the literature use data collected prior to 2012 (e.g., Aguiar

and Martens (2016) use data from 2011, Papies and ven Heerde (2017) use data from 2003-2010,

and Koh et al. (2019) use data from 1982-2012). During these periods most music sales were

generated through a la carte purchases of physical albums or digital albums or singles. Since 2012,

music streaming services such as Spotify have become significantly more popular ways for

consumers to access music. Unfortunately, there is no peer-reviewed academic literature of which

we are aware that estimates piracy’s impact on subscriptions and consumption through

subscription streaming services. Thus, while our meta-analysis strongly suggests that piracy harms

sales, it comes from a time when the primary method of consumption looked different than it does

today. In Section 4 we will discuss in more detail the importance for future research to analyze the

impact of piracy on consumption through legal streaming services for music.

Movies and Television: Research on the effect of video piracy on legal markets for film and

television is similar to that for music piracy in that the studies examine different sales channels

(box office, DVDs/Blu-Rays, paid downloads, subscription streaming, etc.), cover different

periods of time, and use different methodologies to establish a causal effect. However, there

appears to be even more consensus among this literature than there was among music—piracy

reduces legal video sales in nearly all peer-reviewed studies and across nearly all motion picture

sales channels.

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Initially, movies are released in theaters, and later through what the industry calls “home

entertainment” channels, which include DVD and Blu-ray sales, purchases and rentals on cable

services and digital sales platforms such as iTunes, and consumption through online subscription

services such as Netflix. While home entertainment sales make up a larger proportion of studio

revenue than theatrical sales, the theatrical release window remains vital to a movie’s financial

success. Theatrical revenue generally comes from a movie’s most ardent fans, and a movie’s

success in the theater strongly influences its licensing value in other downstream channels (see,

for example, Gunter (2018), Smits (2016), and Grant and Meadows (2010)).

Among the studies analyzing the impact of piracy on theatrical revenue, Bounie et al. (2006) use

survey data of French consumers and find no evidence that piracy affects box office sales. In

contrast, De Vany and Walls (2007) find that piracy of one major studio film caused the picture to

lose about $40 million in U.S. box office revenue. Hennig-Thurau et al. (2007) find evidence that

piracy cannibalizes box office sales in Germany, but their study estimates the total effect of piracy

across all channels and thus does not isolate the magnitude of the loss in the box office (just the

direction of the effect). Ma et al. (2014) study Hollywood studios’ major wide release films

between 2006 and 2008 and find that pre-release piracy—piracy that occurs before the film appears

in theaters—causes a 19.1 percent decline in box office revenue over and above any losses caused

by post-release piracy. McKenzie and Walls (2016) study Australian theatrical ticket sales in 2010

and 2011 and find that piracy causes a statistically significant displacement effect on Australian

box office revenue, attributable to the delay between the U.S. theatrical release of a film and its

release in Australia, but they find that the magnitude of the loss is economically small. Finally,

Peukert et al. (2017) study the effect of the Megaupload shutdown (at the time a very popular

cyberlocker) on film box office revenues for both large-budget, wide-release films and smaller,

independent films. For large budget, wide-release films (which represent the top 10 percent of

films by revenue), they find that shutting down Megaupload caused a statistically and

economically significant increase in ticket sales. However, they find no statistically significant

effect on the box office for the middle 80 percent of films in their data, and for some small

independent films they find that shutting down piracy on Megaupload decreased box office

revenues. Their finding implies that piracy may have positive word of mouth effects for some

smaller, limited release films.

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Thus, of the six peer-reviewed studies on the effect of piracy on box office revenue, two find

economically and statistically significant displacement rates, one finds evidence of a statistically

significant but economically small displacement effect, one study finds no evidence of a

displacement effect, and one study finds that piracy causes significant harm to box office sales of

wide release films but has little impact, or in some cases a positive impact, on smaller independent

movies.

There is more consensus in the literature studying the impact of piracy on home entertainment

channels. While the study by Bounie et al. (2006) discussed above finds no evidence that piracy

harmed French theatrical sales, the authors find that piracy had a strong negative impact on VHS

and DVD sales and rentals. Likewise, Rob and Waldfogel (2007) use survey data from a sample

of U.S. college students in 2005 and find that each instance where a person first consumed the

content via piracy reduces paid consumption by one unit. Bai and Waldfogel (2012) apply a similar

methodology to a sample of Chinese University students in 2008 and find a displacement rate of

0.14 lost sales for each illegal download, which likely implies that a larger percentage of piracy in

China was driven by individuals who would not have purchased in the absence of piracy. Hennig-

Thurau et al. (2007) also employ survey data from a sample of German consumers in 2006 and

find that piracy causes annual movie revenue losses of about $300 million in Germany. Finally,

Danaher and Smith (2014) study the shutdown of Megaupload in 2012 and find that shutting down

just this one site increased digital movie revenues (from digital downloads and rentals) by 6.5-8.5

percent across twelve different countries, implying that losses to piracy are higher than this (since

much piracy remained after the shutdown of this one popular site).

In the context of home entertainment sales of television content, Danaher et al. (2010) use a natural

experiment approach and found that removing NBC television content from the iTunes store in

2007 caused a 12 percent increase in piracy relative to a control group of content from other

networks. Similarly, when NBC content was restored to iTunes a year later, piracy fell.

In the context of piracy’s impact on subscription streaming services, Danaher et al. (2020) find

that the UK blocking of 53 major video piracy websites caused a 7-12 percent increase in visits to

paid subscription streaming sites, along with a 1.1 to 1.5 percentage point increase in the

probability that a user of the blocked sites would sign up for a new paid subscription as a result of

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the blocks. This finding implies that piracy cannibalizes both visits to paid subscription sites (like

Netflix) and subscription payments to such sites. The study also establishes a lower bound on the

rates of displacement for these legal channels (again, because the website blocks did not eliminate

all piracy).

There is one contrasting study of the impact of piracy on home entertainment sales. Smith and

Telang (2009) find that in 2005-2006, films that were broadcast on television experienced a boost

in DVD sales at Amazon.com, but that the presence (or lack) of a piracy source for a film online

at the point in time it was broadcast did not attenuate this sales increase.

Together, seven of the eight peer-reviewed studies analyzing the effect of piracy on home video

sales find evidence of statistically and economically significant displacement effects, while one

finds no evidence of an effect, but this last study pertains to films during a period long after their

peak sales. Broadly speaking, the literature also shows that reductions in home video sales is

economically significant—whether the displacement rate is one-for-one as in Rob and Waldfogel

(2007) or one-for-seven as in Bai and Waldfogel (2012). For example, if the shutdown of one

popular piracy site—Megaupload.com—caused a 6.5-8.5 percent increase in digital movie

revenues in spite of all of the video piracy that remained after Megaupload, total losses to

rightsholders from piracy in the home market could be quite substantial.

In summary, nearly all of the studies on video piracy find evidence that piracy displaces theatrical

and home entertainment sales. However, the estimates for home video losses are, on average, larger

than those for the box office, with the exception of the study on piracy that occurs before a film’s

theatrical premiere (suggesting that the special case of pre-release piracy may be particularly

devastating to theatrical revenue).

Books: Book piracy and its effect on legitimate sales remains largely unstudied in the academic

literature. We are aware of only one study that informs this question: Reimers (2016) studied the

effect of private copyright protection on book sales. Copyright protection in Reimers’ context

consisted of an intense campaign of takedown notices sent to piracy sites for some titles and not

others. She found that this sort of protection increases e-book sales of protected titles by 14 percent

relative to a control group of titles that received no extra protection. This implies that book piracy

decreases e-book sales by at least 14 percent, and likely more if one assumes that not all piracy of

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the protected titles was prevented. However, Reimers also finds no increase in print book sales of

protected titles. This implies that digital book piracy is a much closer substitute for digital book

sales than for physical book sales.

2.3 Indirect Impacts of Piracy

While most of the academic literature has focused on the direct impact of piracy on legal

consumption, there are five notable indirect impacts that piracy could have on both the

entertainment industry and on society in general.

First, while studies in the literature have shown that the impact of digital piracy is lessened when

digital à la carte and streaming-based distribution channels are made available to consumers, this

only conveys part of the story. While it may be true that entertainment firms’ use of digital

distribution channels and streaming services have reduced the impact of piracy, the fact remains

that the presence of piracy lessens content creators’ bargaining power in negotiations with digital

platforms. For years, a key component of content creators’ economic leverage in negotiations was

their ability, granted by copyright law, to withhold their content from a distributor if they were

unable to obtain favorable terms. Given the presence of piracy, it is likely that content creators

have been forced to accept less favorable terms from distributors than they otherwise would have

obtained. Piracy may cause creators and rightsholders to accept less favorable terms given that

some revenue (through a less favorable contract) is better than no revenue (if erstwhile consumers

choose to pirate when content is unavailable on legal digital distribution channels). If this is the

case, it would mean that piracy harms industry revenues in ways that do not show up in figures

cited above for the direct effect of piracy on sales. This hypothesis is loosely consistent with the

fact that platforms that solely provide licensed music content pay rightsholders far higher rates

($12/1,000 streams for Apple Music and $7.50/1,000 streams for Spotify) than does YouTube

($1.50/1,000 streams) which hosts both licensed and unlicensed content.34 In a 2017 article, Cary

Sherman, then CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, attributes the difference in

streaming payments to the fact that “YouTube wrongly exploits legal loopholes to pay creators at

rates well below the true value of music.”35

34 https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/08/21/apple-music-spotify-youtube-riaa/ 35 https://medium.com/@RIAA/2016-a-year-of-progress-for-music-4e9b77022635

29

A second, and related, indirect effect of piracy on sales is that content creators may be forced to

reduce the length of their release windows in the presence of piracy. There is empirical support for

this. For example, Danaher et al. (2015) show that in the presence of digital piracy, “releasing

digital movies before the physical (i.e., DVD and Blu-ray) release date nearly doubles U.S. digital

sales,” and Smith and Telang (2013) show that in the presence of digital piracy “an additional 10-

day delay in a particular country between the availability of digital piracy and the availability of

the legal DVD is correlated with a 2-3 percent reduction in DVD sales in that country.” However,

reducing release windows—even if optimal in the presence of piracy—can reduce the

rightsholder’s profits as compared to a world where piracy was not available by making it more

difficult for the rightsholder to segment customers with different valuations for the content.

A third indirect effect of piracy is that rightsholders spend a great deal of money to protect their

intellectual property against piracy. This includes the added costs to protect digital copies of files

before their release dates, the cost of contracting with firms to watermark digital files during their

digital release, the costs associated with monitoring sites for pirated content and sending requests

to online platforms to remove pirated content from search results, and the costs associated with

lobbying governments for stricter antipiracy legislation.

A fourth indirect effect of piracy is the impact piracy may have on the incentives for artists to

create. It is difficult to identify the effect that piracy may have on the supply of new entertainment

products to the market, both because such supply-side effects might only manifest slowly over a

number of years, and because Internet piracy materialized at the same time that digitization

lowered the costs to produce, promote, and distribute entertainment products. In short, at the same

time that piracy has been reducing demand for creative works, digitization has been reducing the

costs required to supply them. In this regard, while Waldfogel (2012) finds that the number of

albums that surpass a certain quality threshold has not diminished since the appearance of Napster,

and Waldfogel (2016) finds a similar result for films, these results represent the net effect of both

the rise of piracy and the rise of digitization.

To analyze the causal impact of piracy on the incentives for artists to create content one would

need to isolate the effect of piracy on the supply of creative works from other effects of digitization.

We are aware of two academic studies that specifically attempt to separate these two effects.

30

Telang and Waldfogel (2018) examine production in the Indian “Bollywood” film industry

immediately before and after the invention of the VCR led to widespread VHS tape piracy

throughout Indian urban areas. They find that movie industry revenues were increasing in the time

leading up to the introduction of the VCR, and accordingly so were the number of Bollywood films

being brought to the market. However, after the VCR made physical movie piracy commonplace

in India, Bollywood revenues began to fall sharply. Moreover, as revenue fell in India the number

of Bollywood films produced began to fall, along with the quality of the remaining films being

created (as measured by ratings on IMDb.com). Because the introduction of piracy here was

unaccompanied by any digitization-related cost reductions for producers, Telang and Waldfogel’s

results show that VCR-based piracy caused a sharp decrease in both the number and quality of

movies produced in India.

Danaher and Smith (2017) take a different approach to analyze whether piracy impacts the supply

of creative content. These authors note that while all countries experienced a surge in video piracy

after the invention of BitTorrent in 2003, some countries’ legal markets were more heavily affected

by this piracy than others. Recognizing that it is difficult to produce a foreign film unless it will

perform well in its local market, they ask whether the number of Academy Award winning (or

nominated) films decreases faster in countries that were more affected by piracy relative to other

countries. They find that countries whose domestic markets have been most harmed by piracy

suffered precipitous drops in the number of award-winning films produced for those domestic

markets, relative to much smaller or no changes in countries whose legal markets have experienced

less harm from piracy.

The results of these two papers suggest that piracy impacts the incentives to create. As such,

countries or cultural markets that pirate more may find a reduction in the number of quality

entertainment products produced that target their cultural preferences.

A fifth indirect impact of piracy relates to the computer security risks pirate sites pose to consumers

who download pirated content. A recent academic working paper suggests that exposure to pirated

content directly increases the likelihood of a user being exposed to malware and computer security

vulnerabilities. Telang (2018) uses a unique panel dataset collected by Carnegie Mellon

University’s Security Behavior Observatory project. This dataset contains a demographically

31

representative sample of 250 users who have voluntarily allowed researchers to instrument their

computers to monitor what sites they visit and what processes are running on their machines

(including both anti-virus software and potential malware processes). This paper shows that

consuming content from pirate websites is causally associated with increased malware infections.

Specifically, a doubling of the time users spent on pirate sites was associated with a 20 percent

increase in the likelihood that they would become infected with malware. In a blog post, Telang

observes that his research shows that while many pirates “don’t worry about the harm that piracy

does to content creators, but they should still be concerned about the harm it can do—to themselves”

through increased exposure to malware and other security vulnerabilities.36

Thus, while there is some academic research on the indirect effects of piracy, much more research

is needed to gain a full understanding of their impact. Nonetheless, the presence of these indirect

effects suggests that the estimates of the direct impact of piracy that we discussed in section 2.3

understate the true impact of piracy on the creative industries, on consumers, and on society as a

whole.

2.4 Summary

The results found in the vast majority of peer-reviewed academic studies indicate that Internet

piracy reduces legal sales of music, film, television, and books. Of the 33 peer-reviewed studies

on this topic, 29 studies find that piracy significantly harms legal sales, while only four find no

statistically significant impact of piracy on sales. Our summary review of these 34 studies can be

found in Tables 1 and 2 at the end of this report.

We also note that the literature shows that digital piracy is generally a closer substitute for digital

sales than for physical sales (e.g., Reimers (2016) in the context of books and Danaher et al. (2010)

and Danaher et al. (2015) in the context of motion picture content). While not directly related to

piracy, Chen et al. (2019) draws a similar conclusion—that ebooks and print books are not close

substitutes in the minds of consumers. The general conclusion that digital piracy is a stronger

substitute for digital sales than for physical sales may inform some of the observed divergence in

findings across the academic literature: most of the studies finding no harm from piracy relate to

36 https://techpolicyinstitute.org/2018/03/13/piracy-and-malware-theres-no-free-lunch/

32

physical sales (e.g., Oberholzer and Strumpf (2007) and Andersen and Frenz (2010) with respect

to CD sales, Smith and Telang (2009) with respect to DVD sales, and Peukert et al. (2017) with

respect to box office sales for small/independent movie releases).

In addition to the direct effect of piracy on sales measured in these studies, there is good reason to

believe that the presence of piracy has important indirect impacts on the entertainment industry

(by forcing them to alter their release strategies of accept less favorable terms in negotiations with

platforms), on society (through reduced economic incentives to create new content), and on

individual consumers (through increased exposure to malware and other consumer security

issues)—although more research is needed on each of these topics.

Given the strong empirical evidence of the harm caused by piracy, it is important to analyze what

strategies firms and policymakers can use to mitigate this harm. We discuss that topic in our next

section.

3. The Effectiveness of Anti-Piracy Strategies

Given the overwhelming evidence in the peer-reviewed academic literature that Internet piracy has

decreased sales and revenues to creators of entertainment products, one might ask what strategies

are available to mitigate this impact. While much of the early academic research focused on

measuring displacement rates due to piracy, a more recent stream of the literature seeks to evaluate

the effectiveness of various business strategies and antipiracy policies aimed at reducing piracy

and increasing consumption through legal channels. In general, this literature takes the position

that pirated versions of goods substitute for legitimate consumption and asks what strategies or

policies can make legal consumption channels more competitive with (“free”) piracy channels.

The research has focused broadly on two different means of achieving this: actions and strategies

that make legal content more appealing to consumers, and strategies or policies designed to make

pirated content less appealing to consumers.

3.1 Increasing the Availability and Appeal of Legal Content

Although pirated versions of books, music, movies, and television shows are copies of the same

essential product, they are differentiated along a number of dimensions that may influence a

33

consumer’s decision to pirate or consume through legal channels. For example, a pirated version

of a film may differ in video quality from a legal version of the film (say, the version offered for

sale on the iTunes store). Piracy channels may also differ from legal channels in terms of

availability of products, timing of product releases, the convenience of using the channel, risks

associated with using the channel, restrictions associated with consumption through the channel,

and, of course, financial cost. Thus, at least in theory, improving the utility of using legal channels

relative to the utility associated with illegal channels along one of these dimensions could entice

some consumers to decrease piracy consumption and increase legal consumption. Whether or not

such strategies work is an empirical question. We examine the empirical evidence related to this

question below, first in the context of increasing the availability of content on digital channels and

second in the context of increasing the appeal of content provided on digital channels.

3.1.1 Increased Availability

There are three academic studies we are aware of showing that making legal content available on

convenient digital channels causes some potential pirates to shift from piracy to legal consumption.

First, Danaher et al. (2010) studied the removal of NBC television content from iTunes in 2007

and found that piracy of NBC content increased by 12 percent after it was removed from the iTunes

store relative to a control group of content from other networks. Moreover, they found that the

increase in total piracy was about twice as large as the number of legal iTunes purchases for that

content before it was removed from iTunes. This increase in consumption implies that, after

shifting to pirate channels, viewers consumed more content than they had when purchasing legally.

Later, when NBC restored their content to iTunes, piracy of NBC’s content dropped by 7-8

percent—a drop that was smaller in both percentage and unit terms than the initial increase in

piracy. This suggests that after switching from legal to pirate channels, it can be difficult to

persuade pirates to switch back to legal consumption.

Similarly, Danaher et al. (2014) considered the addition of ABC television series to Hulu in 2009.

At the time, Hulu was a free streaming channel supported by a small number of short

advertisements. The addition of ABC’s content caused piracy of that content to drop by 25 percent

relative to a control group of content that experienced no similar change. It is likely that the

decrease in piracy from adding content to Hulu is larger than that from adding content to iTunes

34

because iTunes charges an a la carte price for downloads while Hulu was free with limited

advertisements.

In the context of making movies available on digital channels, Smith et al. (2019) studied the

addition of 1,520 catalog films to the iTunes store from 2011 to 2012. They found that making

these movies available for purchase and rental on iTunes decreased piracy of the same films by 12

percent relative to a control group of films.

Thus, the existing literature shows that the availability of content through convenient legal digital

channels can reduce piracy of that content, but it also suggests that lack of legal availability alone

does not drive piracy, as none of the shifts in availability cited above reduced piracy by more than

25 percent.

3.1.2 Increased Appeal

With regard to the convenience and usability of legal channels, there is some evidence that

reducing restrictions on the use of legal content—specifically, making content more portable

across devices—can increase the competitiveness of the legal channel. Zhang (2017) studied the

DRM system that was once associated with iTunes music downloads. Under this system, music

downloads from iTunes could only be transferred to other devices with iTunes software, and only

if the device was signed in under the original purchaser’s account. Further, a purchased song could

only be shared to a limited number of devices. As a result, users faced significant restrictions in

how they could use their purchased content, especially compared to the usability and flexibility of

illegal MP3s downloaded from piracy networks, which could be played and shared across devices

made by many different manufacturers and on an unlimited number of devices owned by a

particular consumer. Zhang exploited the fact that different music labels removed this DRM

system from the iTunes download store at different times and found that the removal of DRM (and

thus the less restricted nature of a legal purchase) caused a 10 percent increase in legal sales on the

iTunes platform. Zhang also found that this increase was largely driven by increases in sales of

lower-selling and less-known albums, suggesting increased sharing and discovery made possible

by the removal of restrictions may have driven this sales growth.

The timing of availability of content across channels also appears to be a factor that firms can

leverage to increase the desirability of legal content over pirated content. In an unpublished

35

working paper, Danaher and Waldfogel (2012) consider international box office release

windows—the time between the U.S. release of films and their releases in foreign countries.

Exploiting quasi-experimental variance in piracy caused by the growth of BitTorrent and the fact

that some genres of film are more heavily pirated than others, they find that foreign box office

revenues decline by at least 1.3 percent for each week between the initial U.S. release of a film

and its subsequent release in a foreign box office. In another unpublished working paper, Smith

and Telang (2013) employ a similar strategy, looking at the period of time between the first

availability of a pirated copy of a film and its subsequent home video release (release on DVD or

digital download channels) in a foreign country. They find that a 10-day delay between the

availability of a film on piracy channels and its home video release in a foreign country is

associated with a 2-3 percent decrease in home video sales.

Likewise, in a peer-reviewed study cited in section 2.2 above, Ma et al. (2014) estimate the effect

of pre-release movie piracy—that is, the effect of piracy that occurs before the start of a film’s

official box office release window. They find that pre-release piracy causes a 19.1 percent decline

in sales over and above any decline caused by post-release piracy. This finding—that pre-release

piracy is more damaging than post-release piracy—again implies that the timing of legal

availability relative to piracy availability plays a role in a consumer’s decision to pirate or purchase.

In short, there is abundant evidence in the literature that the timing of the release of content on

legal channels relative to piracy availability can change some consumer’s decisions about whether

to consume in legal or pirate channels.

Finally, we are not aware of published papers finding that increasing the video or audio quality of

pirate offerings impacts legal sales; there is one working paper that suggests that this is likely true.

Burch et al. (2019) study the effect of piracy sources of varying qualities on U.S. box office

revenues of films. They find that while low quality piracy sources cause a 31 percent decrease in

revenue after they become available (relative to a hypothetical world where no piracy exists), the

subsequent emergence of a high-quality pirate source causes an additional 14 percent decline in

theatrical revenue. This implies that the relative quality of pirated copies versus legal copies of

films—and possibly other entertainment goods—moderates the effect of piracy on sales.

36

In summary, it is clear that rightsholders can, to a degree, compete with piracy by increasing the

availability of products on convenient legal channels, by reducing restrictions on how consumers

are able to use their purchased products, by reducing the delay in legal availability between releases

of products across various channels and across geographic areas, and by competing on quality.

However, it is also clear that none of these strategies alone is a panacea, as each one only causes a

limited decrease in piracy and a limited increase in legal consumption when piracy remains a free

alternative, ubiquitously available across the world, often at an early stage in a product’s lifecycle.

Perhaps the strongest evidence that firm strategies are limited in their ability to combat piracy by

making legal content more appealing comes from de Matos et al. (2018). These researchers worked

with a major multinational telecommunications provider to run an experiment where they

randomly selected a subset of the provider’s subscribers and gifted them with free access to a large

subscription video on demand (SVOD) service, a service that contained a plethora of popular

television shows and films. They found that, although this free offering caused selected households

to increase their legal video consumption, it caused no change in the use of BitTorrent. Moreover,

even for the particular set of households whose preferences were closely aligned with exactly the

content that was available on the SVOD service, the free gift only caused an 18 percent decrease

in the likelihood that they used BitTorrent. Thus, while legal availability on an attractive, and in

this case free, channel can increase legal consumption and decrease piracy, to the extent that piracy

remains readily available to consumers it represents a compelling alternative to legal consumption.

3.2 Making Illegal Content Less Attractive

The alternative to making legal content more attractive is making illegal content less attractive.

Although piracy is often financially free, Danaher et al. (2010) note that consumers may face a

number of non-financial costs associated with pirating content. These may include search and

learning costs associated with finding piracy sites and learning to use them, risks associated with

downloading malware from piracy sites, the risk of getting caught pirating and facing legal

penalties, consuming lower quality content on pirate networks, and possibly the moral qualms

associated with illegal activity or with consuming content without providing remuneration for

creators.

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There are variety of policies and strategies that firms and governments can take that may increase

the magnitude of these costs to consumers, but whether increasing these costs will actually change

behavior is debatable in theory and thus a question for empirical researchers. Fortunately, this topic

has received significant attention from academic researchers, who have estimated the effects of a

sufficiently large number of policies and strategies that we can begin to draw conclusions as to

which anti-piracy policies are effective in changing consumer behavior.

Following Danaher et al. (2020), we broadly classify anti-piracy enforcement actions as either

“demand side” actions or “supply side” actions. Demand side anti-piracy enforcement refers to

actions or policies that target consumers of pirated content, usually with potential penalties or

education efforts meant to dissuade them from illegal consumption. Supply side anti-piracy

enforcement refers to actions or policies that target the websites, software, payment processors, or

protocols that facilitate piracy. Such actions can be further divided into two sub-types—actions

that attempt to remove pirated content from the Internet, and actions that attempt to make pirated

content more difficult or costly to access from the Internet.

Danaher et al. (2020) published a table that presented the results of peer-reviewed academic studies

on antipiracy enforcement actions and summarized their findings by category of action. We present

a version of that table at the end of this report, adapted to include additional published papers and

an additional column to differentiate between public (government imposed) and private (firm- and

industry-led) policies.

3.2.1 Demand Side Interventions

We are aware of four studies that ask whether various demand side antipiracy interventions have

been effective at decreasing piracy and increasing sales. The first of these involves a private

intervention—the music industry’s targeting of individual pirates with legal threats and lawsuits.

Bhattcharjee et al. (2007) find that these threats decrease individuals’ tendency to download and

share pirated music files.

Danaher et al. (2014) studied the HADOPI law in France, a law that empowered rightsholders to

monitor Internet traffic from French citizens for instances of copyright infringement, and target

individuals found pirating with legal warnings and penalties. They found that this law caused

French digital music sales to rise by 22-25 percent relative to a control group of countries, and that

38

this increase was larger for more heavily pirated genres. They also found that this increase began,

not when the law actually became effective, but when heavy publicity over its debate in Parliament

increased awareness of the law among French citizens.

Adermon and Liang (2014) studied the IPRED law in Sweden, a law that increases the ability of

rightsholders to pursue cases against pirates. The researchers found that this caused music sales to

increase by 36 percent for the six months after the law was passed; however, the researchers found

that music sales returned to normal (pre-IPRED) levels after citizens observed lax enforcement of

the law.

Finally, Mckenzie (2017) studied the passage of a number of graduated response antipiracy laws

across six different countries, finding no increase in box office sales across those countries after

the law was passed. In light of the other studies in the literature, cited above, one interpretation of

this result is that piracy’s effect on the box office in these countries was smaller than its effect on

other sales channels and formats, leaving little room for antipiracy laws to boost box office

revenues.

Overall, these studies suggest that demand-side antipiracy policies can be effective at increasing

legitimate consumption—at least through some channels—but that the effect stems from

consumers’ awareness of enforcement against pirates and their associated perception of the legal

risks of using pirate channels. This appears to be true whether the antipiracy enforcement stems

from public or private efforts (although it is important to note that private efforts often rely on a

public legal framework for upholding copyright protections). Danaher et al. (2017) also note that,

in general, taste for direct demand-side antipiracy enforcement has waned in recent years,

potentially due to the direct costs and legal overhead associated with demand-side anti-piracy

efforts. For example, the HADOPI has been largely restructured to focus on educational efforts

rather than penalties against pirates.

3.2.2 Supply Side Interventions

As taste has waned for demand side anti-piracy enforcement, the use of supply-side anti-piracy

efforts has grown. Such efforts may include cease and desist (takedown) notices sent to websites

that host pirated content or websites and search engines that provide links to such content, efforts

to shut down entire sites that are dedicated to hosting pirated content, or efforts to require Internet

39

Service Providers (ISPs) to block access to websites that facilitate piracy. While early research on

supply-side anti-piracy efforts was divided as to its effectiveness, more recent research has helped

to identify conditions under which such efforts can increase legal consumption by reducing piracy.

We are aware of three studies that focus on the removal of pirated content from Internet websites.

Both Danaher and Smith (2014) and Peukert et al. (2017) study the shutdown of Megaupload.com,

the largest piracy cyberlocker in the world in 2012, and ask whether it increased legal consumption

of movies. Danaher and Smith (2014) use variation in Megaupload’s adoption rates across

countries as quasi-experimental evidence and show that Megaupload’s shutdown led to a 6.5-8.5

percent increase in digital movie revenues (i.e., paid legal sales and rentals) for large Hollywood

studios (who primarily produce big-budget, wide-release blockbuster films). They note that

shutting down Megaupload also caused a chilling effect on other piracy operations, causing some

to voluntarily shut down, and thus the observed increase is likely due to the combined effect of the

Megaupload shutdown and indirect effects it had on piracy at other sites.

Peukert et al. (2017) study the effect of the Megaupload shutdown on film box office revenues and

find that shutting down Megaupload increased revenues for large blockbuster films, but that it had

little effect on smaller releases and even had a negative impact on the bottom 10 percent of films,

which may have actually benefitted from the word-of-mouth effects associated with piracy (due to

lack of awareness of such films). Because both studies find that big-budget, major studio films

benefitted from shutting down Megaupload, the overall impact on the movie industry in aggregate

is almost certainly positive, since sales of such movies make up the vast majority of overall

revenues.

Reimers (2016) also studied the removal of content from the Internet. In her context, this removal

was achieved through private efforts: hiring a firm to seek out pirated versions of e-books and send

takedown notices to the websites on which they were hosted. Reimers found that this anti-piracy

effort caused a 15 percent increase in e-book sales for the treated titles, though she found no

40

corresponding increase in physical book sales.37 Thus, all three studies that focused on removing

pirated content from the Internet found it to be broadly effective at increasing industry sales.

In the context of studies of blocking access to sites providing pirate content, Poort et al. (2014)

found that when The Pirate Bay—the largest P2P torrent piracy website in the world—was ordered

to be blocked by ISPs in the Netherlands, it caused no lasting decrease in total Dutch piracy.

Similarly, Aguiar et al. (2018) studied the shutdown of Kino.tv, a major German piracy linking

site. Because this site contained links to pirated content, as opposed to the content itself, Danaher

et al. (2020) argue that its shutdown is more similar to site blocking efforts than to the Megaupload

shutdown given that the shutdown of Kino.tv did not remove pirated content from the Internet but

rather was an attempt to make the pirated content linked through Kino more difficult to find or

access. Aguiar et al. found that the shutdown of Kino.tv caused no increase in visits to legal

consumption sites, but instead caused users to increase their visits to piracy sites other than Kino.

Aguiar et al. also find that the Kino.tv shutdown caused many new piracy sites to spring into

existence, presumably to take the place of the one that was shut down. These two studies suggest

that blocking access to pirated content through a single dominant channel does not cause

consumers to decrease piracy or increase legal consumption.

In this regard, Danaher et al. (2020) study three separate—and increasingly broad—instances of

website blocks in the UK. In the first instance, in May 2012, only The Pirate Bay was blocked by

ISPs, and the authors confirm findings described above: blocking access to a single site did not

cause legal consumption to increase, and pirates simply increased their use of other piracy sites.

However, these results change in November 2013 when the courts ordered ISPs to simultaneously

block access to 19 different major video piracy sites. These simultaneous blocks caused prior users

of those sites to increase their visits to paid legal streaming sites (like Netflix) by 8 percent.

Similarly, these authors find that the court-ordered blocks of 53 additional sites in 2013 caused a

7-12 percent increase in visits to paid legal streaming sites and an increase in new legal

subscriptions to these sites. In short, this study found that consumer behavior changed only after

it became sufficiently inconvenient for users to find new piracy sites. Thus, when trying to make

37 Note that Reimers’ finding that digital and physical books are not strong substitutes is broadly consistent with Chen et al. (2019) who find that the availability of ebook titles has a small and statistically insignificant impact on print book sales.

41

illegal content difficult to access, anti-piracy enforcement actions must substantially raise the

search costs associated with piracy in order to have an impact on consumer behavior.

Another peer-reviewed study confirms that raising search costs for pirated goods sufficiently can

influence marginal consumers to switch from piracy to legal channels. Sivan et al. (2020) ran a

laboratory experiment in which participants were asked to acquire a copy of their favorite movie.

To provide a differential treatment effect, participants were required to use a search engine created

by the researchers. For the control group of participants, when searching for film titles, the search

engine would return the same results that Google would return for whatever search term the

participant used. For the treatment groups of participants, the search engine returned Google’s

results but with links to piracy websites shifted to lower ranks in the search results. The researchers

found that these shifts mattered—prioritizing piracy results caused a statistically significant

increase in the share of participants who pirated the movie they were trying to obtain, and de-

prioritizing piracy results caused a statistically significant decrease in pirate consumption.

Together with the results from Danaher et al. (2020), these results imply that the level of search

costs associated with finding pirated files play a central role in the consumer’s decision to pirate

or purchase, and the raising these search costs sufficiently can cause erstwhile pirates to acquire

content through legal channels.

3.3 Summary

The peer-reviewed academic literature shows that pirates can be induced to consume through legal

channels by both increasing the attractiveness of legal content and decreasing the appeal of illegal

content—through both demand-side efforts targeting individuals consuming pirated content and

supply-side efforts targeting sites providing pirated content. However, the literature also shows

that not all anti-piracy efforts are equally effective. Demand side efforts targeting consumers of

pirated goods appear to be effective when they increase consumers’ perception of the legal risks

of getting caught, but such efforts lose their impact when consumers perceive low enforcement.

Likewise, supply side efforts that remove pirated content from the Internet can influence consumer

behavior toward legal consumption, but only when a sufficiently large number of sites are blocked

simultaneously.

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This literature also shows that no single policy or strategy that has been studied has been a cure-

all for piracy. As such, it appears that a combination of efforts are required to mitigate the effect

of piracy on legitimate markets for entertainment goods. Although we are not aware of research

that has established this concept, it is likely that strategies to make legal content more attractive

and policies to make illegal content less attractive are complements. Making pirated content harder

to find is likely to have a larger impact on consumer choice if legal content is readily available in

a timely fashion than if the content that consumers want to enjoy is difficult to find on legal

channels or is not available until long after it becomes available through piracy. Similarly, making

legal content available on convenient legal services is likely to have a stronger impact on consumer

behavior if piracy is perceived as a costly, inconvenient, or risky alternative. If there is little anti-

piracy enforcement—and piracy remains a free, easy-to-use and riskless channel—legal

alternatives will have less impact on pirate consumption.

Thus, the most natural conclusion one can draw from the peer-reviewed literature is that the

combination of firm strategies to make high quality legal content readily available and easy to use,

and government and private actions to reduce the appeal of pirated content, is the most effective

way to reduce piracy’s impact on legal markets.

4. Open Questions for Future Research

There is an extensive academic literature on the impact of piracy on legal markets. The vast

majority of this literature finds that piracy hurts the sales of copyrighted goods in legal markets.

Our review of the literature finds that 29 of 33 peer-reviewed academic journal analyzing this

question found that piracy results in significant harm to revenue in legal channels. There is also an

emerging academic literature showing that these reduced economic incentives lead to reduced

output by creators. Finally, there is a growing literature showing that anti-piracy initiatives by

firms and governments can be effective at shifting consumption away from piracy and toward legal

alternatives.

In spite of this accumulated knowledge, there are a number of open questions requiring future

research. First, most of the research on piracy and legal markets for music focus on periods of time

when music ownership—either through physical CDs or digital downloads—was the primary form

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of consumption. In today’s market streaming is the dominant form of consumption, and more

research is needed to understand the impact of piracy on consumption in legal streaming channels.

Another area that requires future research is broadcast piracy, or piracy of live video streams. Live

entertainment, such as sports, is thought to be more resistant to the detrimental effects of piracy

because people prefer to watch these programs as they are broadcast, making download piracy

(which becomes available after broadcast) a poor substitute for live consumption in legal channels.

It is possible, however, that the increasing quality of live streaming of events will erode the ability

of broadcasters to extract revenue from live sports and events.

Broadcast piracy not only affects live events, it is also used to rebroadcast paid cable television

channels, such as HBO. Industry estimates put losses from this type of piracy in the range of 16

percent of all broadcast television revenues, or $34.7 billion per year, and this form of piracy is

likely increasing.38 However, there is no rigorous, peer-reviewed academic work that we are aware

of studying this phenomenon. As such, the impact of live streaming on industry revenues is a

fruitful area for future academic research.

Finally, while goods like books, music, television and films have been effectively digitized,

leading to widespread piracy of such goods, there are many other goods which have not been

digitized or heavily exposed to piracy (for example, toys and action figures, collectibles, and

clothing). As 3D printing becomes cheaper and more accessible, we expect to see more goods

effectively become “digitized” in the sense that their designs can be exchanged in a digital format,

in turn reducing marginal cost for a consumer to make a copy of the product via 3D printing. This

may lead to increased piracy of some physical goods, much like digitization and filesharing led to

piracy of media goods. Given this potential, it would be helpful for future research to analyze how

3D printing and piracy of the patterns for physical goods affects both markets for those goods and

the incentives to create such goods.

38 https://www.sandvine.com/inthenews/inside-the-complex-world-of-illegal-sports-streaming

44

Table 1: Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles Finding No Statistical Impact of Piracy

Citation Media Type Primary Data Result Oberholzer and Strumpf (2007, Journal of Political Economy)

Music—Physical and Online Album Purchases

2002 OpenNap music downloads, 2002 U.S. sales of popular albums

“[F]ile sharing has had no statistically significant effect on purchases of the average album in our sample.”

Smith and Telang (2009, MIS Quarterly)

Movies—Physical (DVD)

2005-2006 Amazon DVD sales ranks and BitTorrent movie file downloads

“[T]he availability of pirated content at [television broadcast] has no effect on post-broadcast DVD sales gains.

Andersen and Frenz (2010, J. of Evolutionary Economics)

Music—Physical (CD) 2006 survey of Canadian customers’ file sharing and CD purchasing behavior

There is “no (statistical) association between the number of P2P files downloaded and CD album sales.”

Aguiar and Martens (2016, Information Economics and Policy)

Music—Digital Clickstream data on a panel of European Internet users in 2011

Find “no evidence of digital music sales displacement by unlicensed downloading” and find a “small but positive” effect “for some countries.”

Table 2: Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles Finding That Piracy Harms Sales

Citation Media Type Primary Data Result Hui and Png (2003, Music—Physical (CD) 1994-98 IFPI “[D]emand for music CDs Contrib. to Economic worldwide CD sales decreased with piracy, […] actual Analysis & Policy) data and physical piracy

rates losses amounted to about 6.6 percent of sales or 42 percent of industry estimates.”

Peitz and Waelbroeck (2004, Rev. of Econ. Res. on Copyright)

Music—Physical (Singles, LPs, Cassettes, CDs)

1998-2002 worldwide CD sales, IPSOS survey data for piracy downloads

Internet piracy may have been responsible for a 20 percent decrease in music sales between 1998-2002.

Stevens and Sessions Music—Physical 1990-2004 consumer “[T]he proliferation of peer-to-(2005, Journal of (Tapes, LPs, CDs) spending on cassette peer file sharing networks since Consumer Policy) tapes, LPs, and CDs 2000 has led to a significant

decline in music format sales. […] Due to the increased availability of the substitute good, downloaded MP3 files, a 1 percent increase in the price of recorded music after 2000 was associated with a more than proportionate 1.4 percent decline in the quantity purchased— decreasing consumption and sales.

Zentner (2005, Topics in Economic Analysis and Policy)

Music 1997-2002 country-level data on music sales and broadband usage

“Countries with higher internet and broadband penetration have suffered higher drops in music sales”

45

Citation Media Type Primary Data Result Bounie et al. (2006, Rev. of Econ. Res. on Copyright)

Movies—Theatrical & Video (DVD or VHS) Purchase and Rental

2005 survey of movie piracy and purchases from French universities

“[Piracy] has a strong [negative] impact on video [VHS and DVD] purchases and rentals” but statistically no impact on box office revenue.

Michel (2006, Topics in Economic Analysis and Policy)

Music—Physical (CD) 1995-2003 U.S. BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey data

“The relationship between computer ownership and music purchases weakened” due to piracy, potentially reducing CD sales by 13 percent.

Rob and Waldfogel (2006, J. Law and Econ.)

Music—Physical (CD) 2003 survey U.S. college student music piracy, sales

“[E]ach album download reduces purchases by 0.2 in our sample, although possibly by much more.”

Zentner (2006, Journal of Law and Economics)

Music—Physical & Digital

2001 survey of European music purchases, piracy

“[Piracy] may explain a 30 percent reduction in the probability of buying music.”

Bhattacharjee et al. (2007, Management Science)

Music—Weeks on Billboard Top 100

1995-2002 Billboard 100 chart rankings, WinMX file sharing post 2000.

P2P file sharing technologies have resulted in “significantly reduced chart survival except for those albums that debut high on the charts.”

DeVany and Walls (2007, Review of Industrial Organization)

Movie—Box Office Box office revenue and the supply of pirated content for an unnamed movie

“[Piracy] of a major studio movie accelerated its box-office decline and caused the picture to lose about $40 million in revenue.”

Hennig-Thurau, Henning, Sattler (2007, Marketing Science)

Movies—Box Office, Rental (DVD), and Purchases (DVD)

2006 survey of German movie purchases and piracy intentions

Piracy causes “substantial cannibalization of theater visits, DVD rentals [and] purchases responsible for annual revenue losses of $300 million in Germany.”

Rob and Waldfogel (2007, J. of Ind. Econ.)

Movies—Legal Consumption (Theater, Television, Rental, or Purchase)

2005 U.S. college student survey movie piracy, sales

“[U]npaid first [piracy] consumption reduces paid consumption by about 1 unit.” “[Unpaid consumption] reduced paid consumption in [the] sample by 2.3 per cent.”

Liebowitz (2008, Management Science)

Music—Album Sales 1998-2003 Census data, Internet use, music sales

“[F]ile sharing appears to have caused the entire decline in record sales [observed from 1998-2003].”

Bender and Wang (2009, International Social Science Review)

Music—Digital (after 2005) and Physical

1999-2007 Country-level annual recorded music sales

“For a one percent increase in piracy rate, music sales declined about 0.6 percent.”

Danaher et al. (2010, Marketing Science)

Television Content – Pirated Digital (Bit Torrent) and Legal Physical (DVD)

2007-2008 BitTorrent downloads of TV shows

“[T]he removal of NBC content from iTunes resulted in an 11.4 percent increase in piracy for its content”

Waldfogel (2010, Info. Econ and Policy)

Music (Songs)— Physical and Digital

2009-10 survey of student music piracy, sales

“[A]n additional song stolen reduces paid consumption…between a third and a sixth of a song.”

46

Citation Media Type Primary Data Result Bai and Waldfogel Movies—Consumption 2008-2009 survey of “[T]hree quarters of [Chinese (2012, Information (Theatrical, Digital, Chinese university students’] movie consumption is Economics and Policy) and/or Physical) students’ movie

behavior unpaid and … each instance of [piracy] displaces 0.14 paid consumption instances.”

Hong (2013, Journal of Music—Recorded 1996-2002 survey data “[F]ile sharing is likely to explain Applied Econometrics) Music Expenditure

(CDs, Tapes, and LPs) from U.S. BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey data

about 20 percent of the total sales decline during the Napster period, mostly driven by ... households with children aged 6-17.”

Danaher et al. (2014, Music—Digital 2008-2011 iTunes The HADOPI anti-piracy law Journal of Industrial (iTunes) music sales in France “caused iTunes music sales to Economics) and other European

countries increase by 22-25 percent [in France] relative to changes in the control group [countries].”

Danaher and Smith Movies—Digital (Sales 2011-2013 Movie sales “The shutdown of Megaupload (2014, Intl. Journal of and Rentals) and rentals, 12 and its associated sites caused Industrial Org.) European countries, 3

major studios digital revenues for three major motion picture studios to increase by 6.5–8.5 percent.”

Ma et al. (2014, Info. Movies—Box Office All movies in wide “Pre-release piracy causes a 19.1 Sys. Research) release, Feb. 2006 to

Dec. 2008. percent decline in revenue compared to [post-release] piracy.”

Adermon and Liang Music—Digital and Digital and physical IPRED copyright reform measure (2014, J. of Econ. Physical music sales in Sweden, in Sweden “increased music sales Behavior & Org.) Norway, and Finland,

2004-2009. by 36 percent in during the first six months [after it was implemented].”

Leung (2015, Information Economics and Policy)

Music Demand— Physical (CD), Digital (iTunes songs), and pirated—and listening options (iPod, Computer, and Radio)

Survey data from ~900 college students in 2007-2008.

“Music piracy decreases music sales by 24-42 percent” but it also “contributes 12 percent to iPod sales”.

McKenzie and Walls Movies—Box Office Australian theatrical Piracy causes “a sales (2016, B.E. J. of Econ. sales, torrent displacement effect on box office Analysis and Policy) downloads, Jan. 2010

through Aug. 2011. revenues” via “release delay between the U.S. and Australian markets”. However, “although statistically significant, the economic significance of this displacement appears relatively small.” “[F]or every 100 downloads [of a median film from the sample data] somewhere between 2.4 and 3.4 cinema admissions are displaced.”

47

Citation Media Type Primary Data Result Reimers (2016, Journal Books—Physical, Print and e-book sales Studies implementation of private of Law and Economics) Audio, and Digital of 653 book titles from

2010 to 2014. copyright enforcement against piracy of some book titles and finds “a protection-related increase of e-book sales […] of more than 14 percent” but “sales of non e-book formats are not affected.”

Papies and ven Heerde (2017, Journal of Marketing)

Music—Concert and Recorded Format Revenues

German recorded music and live concert revenues for ~400 popular artists from 2003-2010.

Piracy and unbundling “weaken the effect of concert demand on record demand”, meaning that live performances have a smaller stimulating effect on record sales as a result of piracy.

Peukert, Claussen, and Kretschmer (2017, International Journal of Industrial Organization)39

Movies—Box Office Weekly box office revenue of 308 movies across 14 countries from 2011-2012.

The shutdown of Megaupload caused “an increase of 47 percent” in box office revenues for the top decile of wide release films, but also caused “an average weekly decrease of 4 percent for narrow release films”.

Koh, Hann, and Raghunathan (2019, MIS Quarterly)

Music—Physical and Digital

U.S. physical and digital album and single sales from 1982-2012.

Piracy displaces legal sales, but “the introduction of licensed digital downloads has weakened the piracy effect” by about “15 percent every year”.

Danaher, Hersh, Smith, and Telang (2020, MIS Quarterly)

Movies—Digital Clickstream data to legal and illegal video sites among a sample of UK Internet users, 2012-2014.

Blocking access to a single dominant piracy site does not reduce piracy or increase legal consumption, but simultaneously blocking access to a number of piracy sites increased legal consumption by 7-12 percent and also caused some users to buy a legal streaming site subscription.

39 This paper finds that shutting down a major piracy website helped box office ticket sales of large blockbuster films, but hurt ticket sales of smaller niche films and had no statistically significant effect on mid-sized films. We include this in the “piracy harms sales” category because in film, sales of the top products drive the vast majority of overall revenues.

48

Table 3: Summary of Empirical Literature on Government Antipiracy Enforcement40

Authors Topic Public

(government) or Private41

Demand or Supply

Side?

Source Content

Removed? Result

Danaher et al. (2014)

HADOPI "three strikes law" in France

Public Demand -Approximately 25 percent increase in digital music sales

Adermon and Liang (2014)

IPRED law in Sweden

Public Demand -

36 percent increase in music sales for six months, then return to normal levels after lax enforcement of law

Bhattacharjee et al. (2006)

Highly publicized legal threats by industry against individual filesharers

Private Demand -

Decreased tendency to share copyright infringing files, but majority of content remained available

Mckenzie (2017)

Graduated response antipiracy laws in 6 countries

Public Demand -No increase in box office revenues of films

Poort et al. (2014)

Dutch ISP domain blocking of The Pirate Bay

Public Supply No No lasting decrease in total Dutch piracy

Danaher and Smith (2014)

Shutdown of Megaupload.com

Public Supply Yes 6.5-8.5 percent increase in digital revenues from Hollywood films

Reimers (2016)

Piracy "takedown notices" and search de-listing

Private Supply Yes

15 percent increase in sales for book titles whose pirated counterparts were removed from websites and delisted from search engines.

Peukert et al. (2017)

Shutdown of Megaupload.com

Public Supply Yes

Increase in box office for large films, decrease in box office for smaller, indie films

40 This table is reproduced with permission from Danaher et al. (2020), but updated with additional studies and an additional column for clarity. 41 We define private enforcement as actions taken by private firms or organizations to combat piracy. However, we note that even private enforcement often relies upon a (public) legal framework upon which copyright can be upheld or enforced.

49

Public Demand Source Authors Topic (government)

or Private42 or Supply

Side? Content

Removed? Result

Aguiar et al. (2018)

Shutdown of Kino.to (popular German piracy streaming/linking site)

Public Supply No

No increase in legal consumption, increase in piracy at other sites, emergency of new piracy link sites to replace Kino.to

Sivan et al. (2020)

De-ranking of piracy sites in search engine results

Private Supply No

Significantly increased the percent of individuals who purchased films legally

Danaher et al. (2020)

Court ordered ISP blocking of piracy websites, 3 separate waves

Public Supply No

Blocking one major site had no effect on total piracy or legal consumption, blocking multiple sites increased legal consumption by 7-12 percent

42 We define private enforcement as actions taken by private firms or organizations to combat piracy. However, we note that even private enforcement often relies upon a (public) legal framework upon which copyright can be upheld or enforced.

50

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